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Hidden costs of a cheap website, in order of arrival

What it costs 6 min read

The bills, delays and dead ends that turn up after a cheap website is finished, and the questions that would have surfaced them before you agreed.

The quote was low enough that you said yes without much thought. The site went live, it looked fine, and that seemed to be that.

Then the bills started arriving in a slow trickle, none of them large, none of them mentioned at the beginning. This is not usually a scam. It is what happens when a price is quoted for the building and not for the owning.

The invoice is not the price

A website has a build cost and a life. The quote covers the build. Everything after it is either included, billed later, or done by you, and a cheap quote is often cheap precisely because it has been drawn tightly around the first day.

That is a legitimate way to sell work as long as the line is stated. The problem is that the line is usually only visible in hindsight, arriving one small surprise at a time.

The first surprise is usually a renewal

The site was built on a platform with a subscription, and the first year came at an introductory rate that then ends. Or the theme it was built on turns out to be licensed annually, and so does the plugin that runs the booking form and the one that makes the gallery work. Each renewal is small. There are four of them and they land in different months.

Meanwhile the hosting may have been included for a year as a sweetener, and the domain renews on its own clock. None of these were hidden, exactly. They simply were not part of the conversation you had.

Ask, before the build: what renews, when, and on whose card.

The second surprise is being charged to change your own phone number

You want the price on the front page updated. You want the new cell number on. You want the Christmas hours up. On a cheap build with no arrangement afterwards, each of those is a job, quoted and invoiced, with a minimum charge attached because nobody bills five minutes.

Two or three of those a year and the difference between the cheap quote and the higher one has closed. The higher one may well have included a small monthly allowance for exactly this.

Ask, before the build: what does a change cost, and is there a minimum.

The third cost is waiting, and it is not on any invoice

Your prices are out of date on the page a customer is reading. The service you no longer offer is still listed and you are taking calls about it. The van photograph is of the van you sold. Every one of these is small, and each one you cannot fix yourself is a thing you carry around.

Then there is your own time, which is the cost owners consistently forget. An evening spent inside a website builder is an evening. That is fine if you would have spent it anyway, and expensive if you were meant to be quoting a job.

The costs that never appear on a bill

The inquiry form that stopped emailing months ago, and you did not notice because a form sending nothing looks exactly like a quiet stretch. The security certificate that lapsed, putting a full page warning in front of anybody who looked you up. The site that loads slowly on a phone in a parking lot with two bars of signal.

There is no honest way to tell you what those cost you. Nobody can count inquiries that never arrived. But the cost is not zero, and unlike a renewal notice it never announces itself.

The last cost is leaving

The real bill on a cheap site usually arrives when you try to move it.

Sometimes the site was built inside a platform it cannot leave, and moving means building again. Sometimes the files exist but nobody will hand them over, or the person who has them has stopped answering. Sometimes the pages come across fine but the words and photographs are all locked inside a template that does not transfer.

The question that decides all of this is whether you own the site and the domain outright, and it is worth settling early rather than at the moment you want to go.

When cheap is exactly the right answer

None of this makes a cheap website a bad idea.

If you are one person, your work comes from word of mouth, and all you need is a page with your hours, your number and a few photographs, then a subscription builder you fill in yourself is a genuinely sensible choice. You will pay monthly, you will do the work, and you will be able to change the phone number at midnight without asking anybody. For a lot of trades that is the whole requirement.

The version to avoid is the cheap site sold as a complete answer, with the running costs left out of the conversation until they arrive.

Ask these before you accept a low quote

Every one of these can be answered in a sentence. If they cannot, that is the finding.

Questions people ask

Is a cheap website worth it?

It can be, if the price is the whole price and you know what you are taking on yourself. It is not worth it when the low figure is only the first of several you have not been told about.

Why do cheap websites end up costing more?

Because the quote covers the building and not the running. Renewals, per-change fees and the eventual cost of moving all sit outside it, and they arrive separately over a year or two.

What are the ongoing costs of a website?

At minimum, the domain renewal each year and somewhere for the site to live. Beyond that, any licenses the site was built on, and whatever you pay to have changes made and problems fixed.

Can I move a cheap website to a new provider later?

Sometimes. If it was built on a platform that keeps the pages inside itself, moving usually means rebuilding. If you own the files and the domain, moving is a routine job.

Should I use a free website builder instead?

For a very simple site, a builder is a reasonable choice, and the free tiers are real. Check what the free version does to your address and whether it puts its own name on your pages before you settle on it.

How do I avoid surprise website costs?

Get the twelve month total in writing before you agree, ask what a small change costs, and confirm you own the site. Three questions, asked while somebody still wants your business.

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